User authentication system based on human exhaled breath physics

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 19; no. 4; p. e0301971
• Main Authors: Karunanethy, Mukesh, Tripathi, Rahul, Panchagnula, Mahesh V, Rengaswamy, Raghunathan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 22-04-2024; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Biology and Life Sciences; Biometric Identification - methods; Breath Tests - methods; Computer and Information Sciences; Diaphragm; Exhalation - physiology; Health aspects; Humans; Machine Learning; Medical examination; Methods; Physical Sciences; Research and Analysis Methods; India
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0301971

This work, in a pioneering approach, attempts to build a biometric system that works purely based on the fluid mechanics governing exhaled breath. We test the hypothesis that the structure of turbulence in exhaled human breath can be exploited to build biometric algorithms. This work relies on the idea that the extrathoracic airway is unique for every individual, making the exhaled breath a biomarker. Methods including classical multi-dimensional hypothesis testing approach and machine learning models are employed in building user authentication algorithms, namely user confirmation and user identification. A user confirmation algorithm tries to verify whether a user is the person they claim to be. A user identification algorithm tries to identify a user's identity with no prior information available. A dataset of exhaled breath time series samples from 94 human subjects was used to evaluate the performance of these algorithms. The user confirmation algorithms performed exceedingly well for the given dataset with over 97% true confirmation rate. The machine learning based algorithm achieved a good true confirmation rate, reiterating our understanding of why machine learning based algorithms typically outperform classical hypothesis test based algorithms. The user identification algorithm performs reasonably well with the provided dataset with over 50% of the users identified as being within two possible suspects. We show surprisingly unique turbulent signatures in the exhaled breath that have not been discovered before. In addition to discussions on a novel biometric system, we make arguments to utilise this idea as a tool to gain insights into the morphometric variation of extrathoracic airway across individuals. Such tools are expected to have future potential in the area of personalised medicines.